Julie Brown Quotes

Going to Catholic school was what fueled me into comedy. The nuns were so brutal so I used to try to make my friends laugh.

I was 10th of 11 kids in an alcoholic, abusive, poor family. We all want things that we can't have. And I found comedy.

When you have a tough childhood, you either cry or make a joke.

Anything traumatic in my life I've always dealt with through jokes and comedy.

The more trauma and bad experiences you have, the more you are able to laugh on yourself and the situation.

Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers.

The way I survived growing up in Jersey City was by being funny. It wasn't by being tough. Nobody thought of me as a tough kid, except for the kids I beat up.

I think so much of my early life, even though I grew up White and middle class, I was completely shattered by the horrifically violent atmosphere I grew up in. I am a consequence of violence. That opened a door to many realities that I would not have experienced had I not survived what I did.

I take the most wrenchingly painful moments of my life, brush them off and present them for the amusement of others. Luckily for me, my childhood was torture.

I came from a tough childhood. There was a lot of stuff that I'd actually forgotten or that I'd blocked or hidden away until I started addressing it.

I had a very rough upbringing.

I never would have made it if I could not have laughed. It lifted me momentarily out of this horrible situation, just enough to make it livable.

I used humor as survival, as a weapon and as comfort.

Experience is valuable only when it has brought suffering and when the suffering has left its mark upon both body and mind.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

Feeling different, feeling alienated, feeling persecuted, feeling that the only way to deal with the world is to laugh - because if you don't laugh you're going to cry and never stop crying - that's probably what's responsible for the Jews having developed such a great sense of humor. The people who had the greatest reason to weep, learned more than anyone else how to laugh.

Whatever it is probably won't go away, so we might as well live and laugh through it. When we double over laughing, we're bending so we won't break. If you think your particular troubles are too heavy and too traumatic to laugh about, remember that laughing is like changing a baby's diaper. It doesn't solve any problems permanently, but it makes things more acceptable for awhile.

The art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable.

One thing I did have under my belt was, my mother lost her mother when she was 11. She mourned her mother her whole life and made my grandmother seem present even though I never met her. I couldn't imagine how my mom could go on but she did, she took care of us, she worked two jobs and had four children. She was such a good example of how to conduct oneself in a time of grief. When I lost my husband, I tried to model myself as much as I could on her.

Trust Emmett to find the joke in the destruction of my life.

All my life, to this day, the memory of my childhood remains grim and incoherent. If I close my eyes and think back, I see little except violence and fear. In those early years, I somehow came to understand I would have to draw from within myself whatever emotional resources I needed to go wherever I was headed. As a result, for years, I became a boy who lived almost totally within himself.

My sense of humor was a tool for me getting past my mother and father separating, my older brother having cerebral palsy, and the bullies in the schoolyard. I had to make them laugh to keep them off my ass. I brought that to my professional career.

If I didn't have a sense of humor, how could I stand this trial now?

I worked in a paper mill all my adult life and there were a lot of funny guys there. So you pick up on that. Even though something really bad might have happened to somebody you can still make a joke out of it.

When you're in a depressed state, having something really bad happen gives you kind of a life again.